The Comedians reborn

This is a post I started in Honduras, but didn't have the internet connectivity to finish:

The Comedians, Graham Greene (1966)


The moment I walked in I was transported to another time and place, another life all together. I had walked out of a land of poverty, desperation, and chaos. I world of a different culture and language.

The restaurant was dim and candlelit, with a couple raucous Americans who, in my judgment, were a little too old to be drinking as much as they were. They had worn faces, deep smiles, and rosey noses. I felt a tension - unspoken but palpable, like someone is going to burst out with it at any moment - between the bar and the door to the outside...

Two worlds: the dirty, dusty, poor reality of present-day Honduras just beyond the threshold. Inside, an overly friendly college girl from the South - her dad owns the big house across the valley ... the only one you can see from here - and her dad's friend who's job is to look after her. He's a writer of novels, a thirsty one at that, but seems to find talking about his latest work to be less interesting than the lady next to him. His charge is overly interested in what we're doing in Honduras and whatever my friend is talking to her at the present.

There is not much more to the story beyond setting the scene. It is more of a portrait than a storyline. But it still strikes me how hard the place was trying to be American, and yet how out of place I felt when I was there.